1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of printing and in particular, to systems and methods to parallelize rasterization of display lists.
2. Description of Related Art
Document processing software allows users to view, edit, process, and store documents conveniently. Pages in a document may be displayed on screen exactly as they would appear in print. However, before the document can be printed, pages in the document are often described in a page description language (“PDL”). As used in this document PDL's may include PostScript, Adobe PDF, HP PCL, Microsoft XPS, and variants thereof as well as any other languages used to describe pages in a document. A PDL description of a document provides a high-level description of each page in a document. This PDL description is often translated to a series of lower-level printer-specific commands when the document is being printed. The process of translation from a PDL description of a document to a lower-level description that may be used to place marks on a print medium is termed rasterization.
The translation process from PDL to lower-level printer-specific commands may be complex and depend on the features and capabilities offered by a particular printer. Flexible and portable general-purpose schemes to translate PDL descriptions of documents to printer-specific commands may allow for the optimization of printer performance based on available memory, desired print speed, and other cost and performance criteria. By parallelizing one or more print processing functions, increased speed and performance may be extracted from printing systems with only a minimal increase in cost. Because rasterization is a significant portion of the tasks involved in print processing, the parallelization of one of more steps performed during the rasterization process will directly help in increasing overall printer speed and performance. Thus, there is a need for a scheme for the parallel rasterization of display lists that builds on prior performance optimizations.